1.6M Cold Emails Decoded: Protocol to Get Leads Every Day & Avoid Common Mistakes #001

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Video: https://youtu.be/Z-44BnPabIo

How to set a successful cold email outreach campaign with 80% open rate and 15% reply rate to get a new lead every single day

Key takeaways:
Targeting: Focus on a niche audience within a 1 hour drive. Filter companies by size to match your capacity. Use databases like D&B to find the right companies and roles. Only email companies, not individuals.

Deliverability: Verify email addresses to get below 1% bounce rate. Aim for 70-80% deliverability. Warm up new email addresses by manually sending to friends and subscribing to newsletters. Use software to automate the process in 2-3 weeks. Set up DKIM/SPF to reduce spoofing. Only send on weekdays.

Copy: Do research to understand customer pains, goals and objections. Address objections upfront. Focus the first email on the top benefit, the second on another benefit. Provide value in follow ups vs just asking if the email was read. Include a simple CTA like 'reply yes'. Use ChatGPT to personalize at different levels.

Testing: Enable open rate tracking on the first 1000-2000 emails to set a baseline. Measure unsubscribes to see common traits. Test on a subset before sending the full campaign. Disable open rate tracking once you reach 8-10% reply rate.

Checklist: Test email thoroughly. Personalized subject line. Concise copy. Mention key benefits. Unsubscribe link. Use Cialdini's principles of influence.

Practical Examples: For a cooking school, target locally within an hour's drive. Filter for companies with a team size that matches your kitchen capacity. Mention how you can help with team building events in the first email, another benefit in the second, and additional value in follow ups. Ask recipients to simply reply 'yes' to get more info.

How to maximize email open-rate?
1. Send a test email to yourself to check that all links work and the email looks good on mobile and desktop.
2. Check that the sender name is correct and the subject line and preview text are personalized.
3. Ensure the copy is concise at around five sentences with only one call to action that is clear and easy to do.
4. Check that the email is value-driven and provides solutions to customer pains.
5. Include an unsubscribe button that works properly and verify email addresses to avoid spam issues.
6. Keep the email short, clear and use influence principles like reciprocity and consistency.
7. Use a short, personalized subject line with the recipient’s name.
8. Personalize the preview text to make people curious.
9. Keep the body copy under five sentences with one question mark and one call to action asking the recipient to do something very easy in the first email.

Links
Company database: dnb.com
Email Databases: hunter.io, apollo.io
Email verification: my-addr.com
Testing mails: mail-tester.com, glockapps.com
Cold email sending: quickmail.io (our favourite). mailshake.com
Scraping: scrapebox.com, octoparse.com

Transcript

Viktor: 0:15

In today's episode, I have the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Mihaly Kertesz a renowned marketing expert who has lent his expertise to clients in 18 different industries. With his vast experience in email marketing, including sending over 1.6 million emails, Dr. Kertesz is here to share his knowledge with beginners. Looking to set up a successful cold email campaign together will explore everything from understanding what a cold email is to creating an effective automated campaign. Dr. Kertesz believes that cold email is an excellent tool for reaching out to dream clients. Scaling inbound marketing and standing out from the crowd of Luo to email spammers. In this conversation, we'll discuss the importance of email outreach for various purposes, such as marketing, broadcasting, job searching, and sales will dive into the risks and benefits of using templates. The significance of research and the best strategies to stand out in email copywriting as we navigate the complex world of cold email marketing. The cover a wide range of topics including targeting capabilities, optimizing email deliverability, and how to craft engaging emails. Using GPT will also discuss the importance of personalization, exploring various copywriting frameworks. And strategies to maximize your email outreach potential. So buckle up and join us on this journey to master in cold email marketing with Dr. Mihaly Kertesz. By the end of this podcast, you had a comprehensive understanding of cold email marketing and how to make it work for you and your business. Don't miss out on this opportunity to learn from the expert in the field. For all insider info, including show notes and transcript, check out disruptor digest.com. today I'm talking to Dr. Mihaly Kertesz, who's graduated from veterinary school and dropped out from his PhD to run a marketing agency with me. His work has been recognized by numerous awards like the Silver Fe and Gordon Award, which is the o Oscar of Marketing Effectiveness. He has helped clients in 18 different industries to optimize marketing strategies with the scientific method. He learned advertising strategy in New York City, and his expertise in, in email marketing especially, is unparalleled cuz he sent more than 1.6 million emails in the last four years alone. And I remember working with him and being all struck by his expertise because there were some variations and emails, which went through 10 to 12 iterations to make sure that they're perfect. And the end result was through the loop roof, basically.

Mihaly: 2:47

Thank you very much, Viktor, and welcome everyone who is listening. So the goal of this podcast would be at the end you will be able to decide if cold outreach email is good for you and also you will be able to set up a basic cold email campaign. But also there are some things and parts that needs deeper understanding so you will know where to dig and you will know what parts you should learn more about to create a very successful cold email campaign.

Viktor: 3:17

So all in all, it's for beginners who don't even know maybe what emia artery regimes are, right?

Mihaly: 3:24

Yeah. I would say it's this podcast is aim for beginners and people who tried EMIA marketing and didn't have any success. And also I think there are some hacks and tricks and tips that even somebody who has been running cold email campaigns for a while can, can learn something. And also both you and I come from the field of marketing and I think cold email is very similar to other marketing channels., and we have more than 12 years of experience in, in marketing. So I think even if somebody has been running coding their campaigns, there will be some, some interesting things that they can learn about.

Viktor: 4:02

And in short, what could be the positive outcome? What, which one can expect if they start to follow what you are

Mihaly: 4:08

gonna share with us? Okay, so, so coding my marketing, I think it's an interesting tool and it's very interesting tool in 2023 when some of the display channels are oversaturated very expensive and people hate them. And also it's very easy to stand out from the crowd of low quality emailers and, and build something great and write good cold emails and create a good MA campaign. And what can you reach with a cold email campaign? So first, you can book appointments with your dream clients. You can scale your inbound marketing flow totally automated., if you are in podcasting, you can get interviewed with High Profile Podcast. Also, you can invite people to your podcast also, if you're, if you're looking for a new job, you can lend, lend your dream job. And most importantly, if you are an intern or you're looking for an intern position, it's good for intern to send your position as well. And also, there are some jobs which are not advertised, and you can tap into that market as well. Also a lot of people using cold email marketing for link building. And I think that is still a scalable and free option for this. But the caveat is that the templates are getting burned, which is true for, for sales, which is true for in, for getting interviews and, and for job search as well. So in this podcast, we will not focus on templates and we will not give you any template because it's a, it's a risky situation that spa filters recognize the template that other pe, other peoples use. And also we would like to help you to understand the strategy behind the call email, and also if you're a startup or if you are developing a new offer. Cold email is very good for a targeted research. So you can get very fast feedback for, for a new product, for a new offer, from a very targeted set of companies, not just from anybody, not just your friends or neighbors or anybody, but your, your actual target audience.

Viktor: 6:05

You, you mentioned that the templates are burned and they're getting burned. What does it mean? And also for me, who is not that knowledgeable in the cold outreach email niche, I would be extremely interested in, in templates. So if there are no templates, then what can I use to get results quickly?

Mihaly: 6:23

There are two things that you can do. If you're interested in templates, you will find a lot of templates. But if you look for templates, please don't just read one, read at least 10 or 20 or 30, because after 20 or 30 templates, you will understand the strategy and you will know. What is, what is the structure that, that we are looking for? Why we are, we are not talking about templates. We will talk about the structure and also why, why people are looking for templates first. Because they don't know how to start. They don't know what should be included. But we will, we will talk about this and we will talk about the actual copywriting and how can you get help from A G P T to with, with, with copywriting. So the, the thing that you, you and maybe other people are looking for templates is something that we will cover without an actual template. Also mention what is burning? What is burning? What, what is, what, what does it mean that a template is burn? So for example, if some high profile blog or news media or marketing guru are publishing their templates, then people will use it and just change a few things. Maybe they don't even personalize. And how spam filters works. Spam filters works that they try to find similar things. What spammers do, for example, who is the sender, what is the ip? And also what is the template, what is the structure, what is the lengths and what are, what are the exact words that spammer use? Spammers use, and on spammer, I mean, people who doesn't give you value, they want to take a value. Maybe they are even scammers. So, so they want to take your money without giving any, anything in return, and you don't want to be that person and you don't want to be, do anything similar to these people. Alright, clear. Thanks. Also, I, I mentioned that it's very easy to stand out from the crown and there is a reason because if somebody can write great called emails, they don't have to write a lot. Maybe they, they have to send a thousand emails a month or so. And they, they get a lot of clients and their bottleneck won't be to send out more emails, but the bottleneck will be the actual scalability of their company and, and the backend workflows and delivering the value. So I very, very rarely get a good cold email, maybe once or twice a year, and, but I get a lot of spams, which, which I end up in, in spam folder, their promotion folder. And it's, it's very easy to stand out if you follow what we will talk about.

Viktor: 8:49

Sounds great. So let's get into the

Mihaly: 8:51

depth of this. Okay. Before you start the coding campaign, the first thing that you need to think about is called email the best and quickest channel for you. Okay. So think about the buying pyramid., the buying pyramid is a pyramid when the bottom level consists of people who have the problem, but they are not aware of it. The next level is people who are aware of the problem, but haven't start in researching solutions. Of them, the people who are actively looking for a solution to their problem. And on the top of the pyramid, if you're thinking about any target audience, maybe the one to 3% of of people, these are the people who are actively seeking offers, comparing solutions, and ready to make a purchase soon. If you have a new offer or new product. I would suggest to start with the bottom of the pyramid because these people has a very high conversion rate. It means out of 100 people, maybe 10 or even 30 people would buy from you if they know that you have an offer and then you have a product. On traditional advertising channels, reaching these people are usually more expensive, but still, if they are more expensive with a higher conversion rate, it's still cheaper to get new clients from this top of the panel funnel part. If, if I would have a new offer, I would start with search outs. Because these are the people, because because these people are actively looking for solution activity means they are looking, they are searching, they are using Bing, they are using Google. They are using other search engines and it's easy to reach them. The problem with this is first it's expensive and second this is a, there is a limited demand. So for example, maybe there is a local market and there is no more than 10 or 20 searches for your product or what you, the searches that are relevant to your product. But still, I would start there because these, these people have the highest conversion rate.

Viktor: 10:48

So this is why like plumbing in a, in a certain city has like the highest cost in the search as, because if someone needs a plumber, he needs most probably like right now. So plumbers are more than willing to spend a lot. So the competition is quite great. And, and it costs that fortune basically to get a lead.

Mihaly: 11:06

Yes, exactly. And also what you said, urgency is a leverage on this. So even if it's so urgent, But also think about plumbers cannot do. Called outreach email to, Hey, is there anything to fix in your house? No, of course not. There is not a, not a moment when there is something to fix, but I'm not looking for a solution because if somebody is leaking hard, then I will search. So yes, there are several fears that you cannot, that Google search is the only viable advertising channel. But after that, most of the, most of the, most of the fields, most of the industries and most of the offers can go one step deeper and focus on the people who has been starting looking for solution or maybe who just just problem aware. They know they have a problem, but they haven't started for solution. And this is where most of the display channels come in, into play. Facebook, Google, display, network, Instagram, TikTok, even. And also this is the phase one when called email marketing is is the most viable. Also cold email is best when you are looking for b2b. When you are selling to businesses and when you're selling to businesses, the two best channels are linked in and coold email because you have superb targeting capabilities. So we will focus on code and how can you target, my wife is a cooking school, so I, I will tell you an exact example. So in a case of a Cook cooking school, which provides team building, cooking events for companies, Google search Chat would be the primary choice because people who are, who want to organize a team building for the company starting, usually starting Google. But the problem with search is there is fierce competition. Demand is limited and you can only reach people who are actively looking for solutions to their problem or at least wants to understand their problem. So here comes the cold outreach email, and you, you, you can know what are the okay, targeting here? What would be the targeting here for a cooking first, it's very local business. People wouldn't travel more than one hour, one hour for a cooking school. So you can have a gal targeting and also you will know your kitchen size. For example, in my, in our cooking school, there are no more than 25 people that we can host in at one time. So we will know that we only target people, only target companies between the employees of five and 25. So these are the super targeting capabilities.

Viktor: 13:33

Can you use this targeting in, in Google ads and Facebook ads? Like or, or where do you sell like the size of the company or these kind of things?

Mihaly: 13:41

In Google ads and, and, and another display and display channel is usually not, but if you are looking for companies, most of the e , European Union companies have public email addresses and you can, you can look for this. Also, there are several company databases in, in the us , when you can filter for industry filter for number of employees, even filter for revenue, can,

Viktor: 14:07

can you mention a tool maybe, which is, which you are

Mihaly: 14:10

familiar with. In Europe, one of the biggest company databases is Quad, dun and Brande. But for every, every country you can find different unusually, and you can dig deep.

Viktor: 14:23

Yeah, so it's, it's gonna be in the show notes then, I guess. So if the listeners are interested in, maybe you cannot put it in the show notes. No worries about that. So basically, to summarize the strategy here is to make a list of potential companies using a company database, no matter it's public or private. And then you use some kind of cold outreach, either a email or quote calling them, right?

Mihaly: 15:16

Yes, correct. And also, just a short legal disclaimer, although, although we are not, it's not legal advice. This podcast is for education purposes. But in most of the world, sending emails to companies is legal, although there are some requirements, but both in the US and the EU is totally legal. But sending emails to persons to private email addresses is usually not legal. But you need to make, make your research about that. But this is why called email is for B2B mostly. Yes. Okay. So after you have a target audience, you, you'll need to decide how many emails, how, how, how long the list should be. And first, I would focus on 1000, about 1000. I tell you why 1000? Because if your cold email campaign is successful, then you can expect about 10 to 15 positive reply rate. And it means out of 1000 email addresses, you can reach about 100 to 150 leads and depend. Oh, wow. Depending on, depending on your offer, it's

Viktor: 16:22

saying like if you outreach the conversion rate to get answers around 10%, it, it seems quite high because in e-commerce settings if visitors are coming to a web shop, the average conversion rate is 2%. So 2% is buying so an email case, like, so, so my, my, my guess would have been much lower. So I would have guessed like, maybe, I dunno, a fraction of a person who is answering your email because it's like, almost like shouting into the

Mihaly: 16:52

void. Yeah, all the first thing about that is, is reply rate. And these are leads, what we are talking about e-commerce, they are buyers usually. Okay. So there is a purchase. So after you have a 10 to 15% reply rate, in my experience, you can reach about it. It's based on the price of your product or service, but you can reach about 20% conversion rate. So outta outta 1000 people, you can get very similar 20 to 30, which is two to 3% final conversion rate to, to getting a client.

, Viktor: 17:23

I just want to touch the listeners that who is not familiar with this field that getting them to 12% com , rec collaborate is, is quite insane because. If you, maybe, maybe you have some benchmarks for like a shitty outreach email. What is the percentage versus a really good one? Because I, I personally saw your magic when you quadruple like, reply reply rates or it's really like 10 x the reply rates. So I just, maybe you can give some numbers to the listeners. Okay.

Mihaly: 17:53

So, so first to, to have this high reply rate, you have to get a high deliverability rate and at least 70% and aiming for 80%. And it's not just one email, but the whole segment. We will talk about follow up soon, but I would suggest to se to send at least four to five emails to one email address before you abandon it. So in this four to five email sequence, you should reach 70 to 80% operate, which means at least one email is opened by 70 or 80% of people. And, and from that, it's, you ask a really, really small thing just. With your first emails just to get a short answer of yes that you are, that they are interested in, in your offer or, or the next step, or, or, or send Yes. Send me more information. And this is the positive reply rate. Somebody sending? Yes, I'm interested. Tell me more. So this is what you can reach 2010 to 15% reply rate. And also there is the difference between reply rate and positive reply rate., the difference is positive reply rate. Somebody's interested and some people will say that we are thank you, we are not interested. So a lot of people are very polite and they don't just unsubscribe but ask you politely to please don't bother us again. Or, yes, we are not interested at this point, but in the future we'll be interested. Maybe also it's an objection and they will, they wouldn't be never interested in the future, but reply rate, even if there are a lot of negative. Replies are coming in. It's good because spam, this is a very, very important, maybe the most important Cigna for spam filters that you are not a spammer because people are replying to do, because think about this fake princess who inherited a huge amount of money and send out scam emails that, can you help me to escrow my, my huge amount of money? They won't get a huge reply rate, maybe zero reply for every 100,000 emails or so. Having a 10 per 15% reply rate is something that spend some spend filters will like and deliver your email

Viktor: 20:06

more. Right. So it's just like to, to summarize what I understand is basically to get a good reply rate is not just like one metric. So you have to get a lot of things down. So first it's like you have to make sure that everyone actually gets the email. So deliverability of the email matters a lot. So, Maybe pretesting the email address you collected, whether they, they can be used as a valid email, right? So that's important step. And then it's not just like sending one email. You send several emails and you also use, as far as I know, the, the word phrase is put in the door technique in sales. But you try to get a short yes for extremely smart things. But instance like sending an essay, long essays, you just send a extremely quick and easy to say yes to email and then you follow up. So this is like the whole sequence you have to make right? In order to get a higher reply rate, right?

Mihaly: 21:01

Correct. So first deliverability, second foot in the door. And there is one third thing, which is I think also very, very important personalization. And you can reach personalization two ways. First, you know, who are you sending to? And that's why I tell you to start with 1000 companies only because it can be very sh very targeted that you will know that these companies. Have the problem that you are offering a solution with a high probability. And also you can be able to talk in their language, use their first names. So this is a personalization part.

Viktor: 21:36

Do you have like tools to recommend for the deliverability

Mihaly: 21:40

checking. Viktor, we talked about this and I know that you like the technical stuff about what can you use for codes? So yes, let's get to it. So first, when you have an email list, even if paid a lot for an email list, there is a high probability that there are some emails which are not working anymore. Maybe the employee whose email you received from a database is not working in that company or they change their domain address or maybe their inbox is just full temporary, but it's still a bounce. And bounce is a very, very bad thing because it's a bad signal for spam filters. So you don't want to get too much bounces. I would say try to keep between l. Lower than 1%., earlier with one of our companies, we sent out an email before we know this, and we reached 20% bounce rate, which is like very, very bad. And we immediately got a call from our email provider that guys, there is something wrong and you shouldn't do it anymore. So we learn this the hard way, but you don't have to. So how can you make sure that your balance rate is low? Check the validity of your emails. The, we will put it in the show notes, but my favorite service called Maya. And for $1 you can verify 5,000 email addresses. Oh, wow. And in my experience with, with their verification you can reach well below 1% or around 1%. Also, if you, before you verify these email addresses, you should And when you have one, only 1000 emails, you can do it manually. If you, most importantly, when you do it first, it is your first email campaign that you can read all these emails because it's like, I dunno, five minutes, 10 minutes to read all of them. And you can, you will find a few examples like John doe do gmail.com and example, the gmail.com that may get authenticated and verified with the tools, but of course it's not for a real person., real person's email address. So you want to eliminate this. And also, for example, Gmail with double L and some TPOs, but usually verification apps for validity and verification like, may we filter out

Viktor: 23:59

these emails. So there, there's basically different levels of services. So because if you use a service which is checking for validity, they may be wrong, right? So they may not work that good. So, and you have this specific service, you have experience that if they say something is right and you theater at all, they're not right email addresses, then you can reach maybe above 99% of the emails which you got back. So it's a huge win because what happens in the background, if I understand correctly, um, if you send out a lots of emails which bounce back, obviously the technological providers, they see it and they just instantly flag you as a spanner and they may be like blacklist your domain, blacklist, your EP address, where you're sending it from, and then you, even though if you're sending out valid emails, you just, it won't get delivered to the inbox, right? Yes, correct.

Mihaly: 24:49

Correct. And here comes the back list and ip. So where do you want to send your email addresses from? First, you don't want to send your main domain. So for example, you want, you don't want to send your name@tesla.com if you are from Tesla, but you want make a separate domain. For example, your name@gettesla.com, or you, you should put a hyphen in the name or something different to, to make a little bit different domain name. And why is it good? Because if you're sending out cold emails, there is always a risk to get blacklisted and it's very hard or maybe impossible to get out from a blacklist. So you don't want to play with your main domain.

Viktor: 25:30

Is it like getting a burner from a sort of like a burner domain name for sending out emails even though you are not doing anything wrong? So you just, just get a separate domain for sending out emails just for the reason. If something goes south, you can set up a new domain, right?

Mihaly: 25:46

Yeah, it's, it's similar, but the good thing is it's hard to spam from these burner emails because you have to warm them up. Okay. Which means you perk on them to look like, which means you should behave like it would be a normal email address. Sure. How can you warm up an email address? The, if you, if you are planning to send a low volume of cold emails and a low volume, I mean less than 1000 emails per month. So it's like 20 or 30 per day. I think it's a low volume, but for some companies, it's more than enough to get enough clients. So in this case, it's good enough to manually warm up your email at email inbox. It means write a few emails to your friends, to your coworkers, to your clients, anybody you can, and ask them to reply like 10 or 20 people. The next thing you can do is subscribe to newsletters., the more frequent, the better. For example, daily newsletters., again, just a few dozen and you'll receive a lot of emails and maybe you can even answer them. And it'll signal a behavior for email providers like Gmail or Outlook that it's a, it's a working real email. So sorry. So

Viktor: 26:59

if you subscribe to newsletters and you get a lots of emails like VO looking and normally delivered emails, it's also positive signal for email providers that you are not a spammer.

Mihaly: 27:11

Yes, because think about why would spammer sign up for a newsletter? Oh,

Viktor: 27:15

it's not a may. Maybe, maybe we just learn this opportunity now because we wanting about sharing secrets here and , and maybe it's not gonna re next month, but this is really smart. I like it.

Mihaly: 27:27

Okay, the next thing is, if you are thinking about higher volumes, Then you should think about warmup softwares, warmup applications, and the landscape is changing on this, but usually the workflow is that you join a pool of other cold email senders and automatic system. You send emails between each other and, and reply with some automatically generated test. It w in, in the past two years., in my experience, it's worked very well., you were able to warm up an email address in two or three weeks. And also with this method, usually you can track the deliverability of this warmup emails, and you'll see that in the beginning it goes from red, which means a lot of in span in two, three weeks go to totally green., which means every, every email lands in the inbox.

Viktor: 28:19

Yeah, I remember you recommended this as almost like one of the first things that, okay, after I, I get a key clean list, I should make like this warmup thing because. The first emails sent out get like maximum 60% deliver rate because of not being warm up and they reflect like a spam. And as it progressed after a few weeks, it was almost 100%. So it had a huge impact. So just think about that. Maybe, maybe if you have a budget for the spend on a client and that quite a new, new lead and your budget is $20 per lead, think about that. If you double the deliverability rate, it's like almost like you can spend 40, right? So it's like you can outspend the competition and it's an insane advantage to optimize the first few steps, which is, and maybe the last steps people think about it. For me, it was short, certainly the last step I was thinking about to optimize. But it, it had a huge

Mihaly: 29:14

impact. Correct. And, and you mentioned 60% deliverability lead. I think it's good when you're starting and also not just one email, but in the, in the whole sequence I mentioned 70 to 80% deliverability lead as a goal. But also the spamming filter line is very thin here. If you are below 60%, if there is a hyper availability that it'll go even further down 55%. And after that, it'll be very easy that you will get flagged and blacklisted. So if your deliverability rate is below 60%, that you need to change things very urgently. Oh, also there

Viktor: 29:50

is like a cutoff point at 60% where things go south much faster, right? Yes. So there's an inflection point, negative inflection point, which you want to avoid. Okay. That's, that's a good thing to know.

Mihaly: 30:01

It is. So the last thing that for in the warmer thing that I want to mention, there is a so-called authentication, which means you set up things in your d n s record, in your domain name, the so-called D K I M and SPF F records., I think nobody has to understand them deeply, but they are some kind of authentication which will make scammers. Harder to send emails from your email address. And this is also a good sign because it's a good practice, it's a good sign for spam filters if you set them up correctly and you can easily Google them and all the email providers like Google Workspace and Outlook provide these authentication information, then you can set up one time and good to go.

Viktor: 30:47

Yes, and I am using beehive for sending emails and managing emails, which is a paid newsletter service. So you can operate a newsletter easily, almost like CK but with more functionality, more marketing tools and stuff like that. And for them it was quite easy. So they, it was quite straightforward in a set, set up process, how, how you should do that. And in the background what, what it does, it's limiting because in the email technology, it's almost like delivering a, a physical letter. You can sign who is, who is it coming from, and you can fake it easily, right? Because you just like take the name and it's like it's coming from somewhere as than you. And it's the same for emails and what SPF and D K I M is doing. It's encrypting and it's saying which IP addresses and which providers can send emails in your name so others cannot abuse it. So because if you don't set it, what going, what can happen is someone notices it and start to spend spam with your domain name and you don't want to have that because then you're gonna get flagged and then you burn your domain and then you have to set up a new one. So it's quite inconvenient. Yes,

Mihaly: 31:54

correct. You are, again you have more knowledge on the technical stuff here, which I not usually go into. I just understand that you have to set them up correctly and that's all. And also you mentioned beehive one of the systems or applications where you can send email from. And the next question is, where should you send email from? Is email marketing automation softwares like team active campaign?, CRM systems are good for sending out cold emails, and the definitive answer is no. There is a distinct difference between email marketing softwares and cold emails. Softwares. What called email applications do is you connect it with your inbox, which can be a Gmail, Google workspace Outlook, and they send it from your account, from your inbox account. What email marketing software do is they send the emails from a IP address, which is used by several other advertisers, smart and other companies. For example, in, in, in case of Mechi, they have a, a server mostly in the us for example, in Atlanta, they have an IP address there, and they send a lot of emails, like millions or maybe tons of millions and emails every day from that email IP address and spam filter snow. That IP address is connected to a email marketing software, so the daily variability rate can suffer. Because they know it's a marketing app. And also if other people who are using the same IP address are spamming that they can get blacklisted. And again, delivery rate will be go lower,

Viktor: 33:31

but you can buy like bigger packages and then they provide a dedicated IP address for you. But it's quite p pricey as I remember. So you almost have to be enterprise level to be able to afford it.

Mihaly: 33:43

Yes, you can do that and also use other softwares like, like SendGrid if you are thinking about millions of emails. But I think it's a different game that we are, we are talking about. And also there is, there is one other very important difference between email marketing softwares and cold email softwares. Email marketing softwares are sending emails in batches. So for example, if you make an automation to send out emails, they send out all the emails in one or two minutes, like 10, 1000, 2000 or 10,000 emails. But what you can do with cold email applications, and it's very, very hard to do with marketing email applications that the coding application, sending the emails one by one and they wait a few minutes, five minutes by default or something like that. And you can change the time difference between two emails so it can have a random effect. So two minutes, then five minutes, then two minutes again. So it's randomized. So again, it's some, you can stay below the radar and not get called, but spare filter to send out a lot of emails. Almost like automating

Viktor: 34:52

what you would do by hand, right?

Mihaly: 34:54

Yes. And if you are sending emails in a specific gal location, so in a country or in a state, It's wise to set up in working hours. So for example, for for the, for our cooking class, we send out emails

only between 7:00 AM and and 10: 35:08

00 AM So this is a small window and every workday and also in business to business, no emails on, on the weekends., because it's again against the common things that people, how people in businesses use is the limit. If you are doing something different that it's a signal for spam filters, that you are doing something bad here. So only work days and only working times. It's

Viktor: 35:37

almost, it feels to me like going to a formula, formula bond, race track with a street car versus a formula bond car, right? So formula bond car is like specifically for that track, specifically to be able to extremely be extremely fast versus your. Car is just like, like a, a normal email software. Like MailChimp is like, yeah, it's an everyday car, right? But it's not optimized for a specific task. And that's kind of like mind blowing for me, as you say, say it now cause it makes a lot of sense. But I wouldn't think about that to actually use the co email outreach software instead of using a general one and these little tricks to try to automate what you would do by hand and don't be stupid about that, basically.

Mihaly: 36:25

Yeah. Just develop your metaphor a little bit further. I think it's a rally car where is a Formula One car? Because marketing, emails, software can be really, really good. A lot of functionality, but , if you go on a go on a rally track with a Formula One car that it'll just broke break easily. Yeah. And the same is true that with a rally car even it's, it's very high performance there. You have no chance on a Formula One track. Yeah. Okay. So. After you set up everything, you set up your inbox, you warm it up, you set up authentication, and you are using the old email applications. The next thing is, before you send out an email is you should check if everything is correct and fortunately there are some very great tools for this. I will mention two. The first one is called mail tester.com. Maybe put it in the show notes with mail tester. You can check if you set up authentication correctly. Also, you can check if, if there are any harmful parts in your email. What can be harmful parts. For example, iframes, JavaScripts embedded codes, which you want to really avoid. So the cold email, I would recommend to go only with plain text. No html, no Gs, no css, nothing, just plain text because this is how your friend would send you an email. Your friend wouldn't design a a grade. Marketing shalon with com, kava or Photoshop to send you an email about your next event or adventure. It'll be a plain text, so your email should look like as somebody received it from a friend. The next one that mayor tester.com can check link shorteners. Don't use link shorteners because again, this, this is a sign of spammers and spam filters are very aggressive on them. Sorry.

Viktor: 38:17

It's, it's kind of like, reminds me what happens when people who is not familiar with marketing try to write marketing copy. Right? It's like advertise and copy or emails or landing page copy or something like that. So they somehow start to overcomplicate things They. Try to sound smart. It's kind of backfire. So it's, it's the same thing with emails as far as I, as far as I understand that if you start to use all the smart things, which, which are smart in a normal email marketing setting, like opening rate tracking or click rate tracking and those kind of things, if you start to use them, it's actually backfiring to you if you try to use cold outreach because cold outreach is easier and better working and simpler. So just sit down, write it as a email to a specific friend. So they're sending, for example, to you, I, I write an email as I'm, and I'm actually sending it to you after it so you can reply back and that you can see, and you can pinpoint weaknesses and, and so on and so on. Versus people over complicated. They, they start to use all the very elite and very flashy technologies and it's backfiring,

Mihaly: 39:27

right. Yeah, don't be flashy. Don't think about it too much. Just use it plain. And, okay. The last thing, and, and we will go to tracking in a, in a minute because it's a, it's a bigger topic. Why would people use link shorteners? So we will, I will get back to it. And so the last thing is worth to mention about mary test.com. That they check that if, if your IP address is blacklisted, you, you can, you can check all the basic things. Somebody's not wrong. And if, if something is wrong, it's easy to fix before you send out before you stand to stand out. You,

Viktor: 40:03

you mentioned quite, quite a lot of tools and, and the process is, is quite. Not that straightforward, but still easy because you have to check deliverability, then you have to check the email itself and then you can send it out. Right, and first, yeah, obviously you have to collect the email versus, but just to give to the listeners a, so if I, you send me, you said that you have to have like a thousand email versus Right, the starting point, which makes sense. How much does it cost to get a thousand emails? Let's say it's for free, but then check the email addresses and then check the email itself with the mail checker you mentioned. So just sending emails out to a thousand valid address and make sure that you maximize your chance to success. Just to give a, like a board or how much does it cost?

Mihaly: 40:50

Okay, I haven't mentioned, what are the in company databases? It's about $200 for 5,000 emails or something like that. There are some global databases like Hunter io and Apple loan.io, and I just checked that it's $100 for 5,000 emails. Also, you can scrape emails., there are some tools like Octopus and scrape books. Again, everything in the show notes. Where you can set up without any coding knowledge to scrape websites for their email addresses. And also just quickly mention here, scraping website websites are 100% legal. There was a famous case where LinkedIn wanted to stop other companies to scrape their website. And the US Court had made the decision in 2019 that scraping publicly available data is totally legal. So you can scrape email addresses, but if you, you, if you don't want to learn about this you can find people on Upwork or Fiber where for a few hundred dollars, they can scrape you any amount of email addresses from, from websites. And last source that I would like to mention look at email addresses is called Built With. Which is a company that focusing on what kind of technology do websites use, for example, do they use a WordPress or some tracking software like Hotjar or Datadog or other one? And you can create a list based on industry and, and the actual technology that people are using on their website. So for example, if you are, if you want to sell WordPress plugins, you can get an email address. This is several websites we are using WordPress.

Viktor: 42:37

Yeah. This just reminds me of a friend of mine who is doing now cold outreach by using basically this, this tool is bandwidth because they're doing development outsourcing. So they, they are developer shop, they're doing hardware, software, and the outreach to companies and see whether they have something they can outsource and they use bandwidth and then they use G P T. To provide extremely personalized and emails and also give ideas to the company about specifically what would fit them.

Mihaly: 43:11

Just to summarize the cost to acquire our list would take a few hundred bucks to 1000 to 5,000 emails maximum. And for this cold email softwares, it's about 50 to $100 per month. And also you should need a, a Google workspace for professional email provider and a domain domain name, which is domain name is $10 per, per year about, and the email provider is, is five, about $5 per month. So I think this is the overall cost for setting up the technology. Oh, it

Viktor: 43:47

makes sense. So it's basically not that expensive if you think in terms of getting quality leads. So if you spend this, this, a few hundred dollars on acquiring 5,000 quality email addresses and you clean them and you make sure that everything is right, and then you can expect around 10% lead or 10% reply rate, which is quite good. So at the end of the day, it, it can be quite competitive, I guess.

Mihaly: 44:14

Yes, you are. Right. But I would emphasize, again, this is, this is the technical part, mostly part, the expensive part is creating good campaigns and working great emails. And in my experience, if somebody haven't. Made any cold email campaigns, it would take them at least three weeks, maybe two months, to really understand the nitty gritty part and reach that level of 10 to 15% operate, which is still, I think, not that expensive, you mean? Yes, reply it. But if you don't want to go on that route you can outsource it. There are several called email marketing agencies, and there is a good thing that they can create your first campaign. You will learn a lot from them. What are the sources of their database? What, what database do they use and how do they filter and how do they set up their campaign? And after that, even a junior marketer can manage the scaling or at least the continuation of that campaign

Viktor: 45:20

to pay for an agency to do this

Mihaly: 45:21

work for you. I think it depends a lot because some agencies work by the hour. Some agencies work by lead. I'm not familiar with the current rates., but if you put it in Google, you will get an o You will get offers very quickly. Okay. One, one application that I want to mention to check if everything is okay with your email campaign before you stand out the emails. And it's called Glock Caps and it's very brilliant what they, what they do. So they give you 70 email addresses and ask you to send a campaign to the 70 email addresses. And these are email emails from all the, all the main email providers, outlook, Hotmail, Gmail, Google Workspace, different emails and, and other ones. And they check if your email is delivering into the inbox or in the spam folder. And also if their, if the IP or your domain name is blacklisted. And out of this seventh email addresses you, you will know that, for example, if you are black to see an outlook, maybe you don't start with Outlook email addresses. You can start with Gmail. Or if you are not get delivered to email inbox, most of them, then you need to change something. That's

Viktor: 46:38

good to know because I guess most of the, at least I would do like, just check and okay, I just see, okay, Hotmail is not delivering and I would send it anyway. But that's a good, good heads up to actually try to avoid first email versus where you can, don't get delivered to the inbox. And then maybe as you work your way up to become reputable and, and have a good spam score, then you can start to send out to the providers where previously you didn't get delivered.

Mihaly: 47:09

So, next one. What are the goals of an email campaigns and what are the metrics that you can measure? First one already talked about open rate. Second one, bounce rate. Then click through rate, then reply rate. So let's go one by one. What is, how can you measure open rate tracking?, the technologies that email applications put a one pixel image in your email and they measure if somebody downloads this email. And of course, your friends wouldn't put a one pixel image in your emails when they inquire about your weekend plans. So this is, again, a bad sign for spam filters, that you're a professional email sender and you want to avoid it. But in the beginning, I would really recommend to use , o open rate tracking and track if you and because this is, if you cannot measure. You cannot manage it. So you, you don't know if is it, if it's the problem, but after you set up, you, you tested the campaign and you reached a good reply rate, like 8% or 10%, then you can open an open rate tracking because it's enough to track the reply. At the reply. Basically

Viktor: 48:25

what you say is that you get a subset of your list, maybe like 10, 20, 30, 50 emails you send email out using water tracking available. At least know where things go south. So maybe people don't even open it or they open it, but they don't reply because there's a huge difference between the two because if they don't open it, maybe you have to work on your subject line. If they open it and don't click, then you have to work on the text itself. So to debug out, so debug. The email itself use a small subset, subset, and once you, you think that it's tested and it works out, you get replies and positive replies and and so on. Then you remove all the tracking and just mass send the email, right?

Mihaly: 49:10

Yes., generally correct, but two small nitty part here. So when you say all the things that you can measure, it's open rate and click through rate, and I wouldn't bother with click through rate with call ds in the beginning. Also, you can, you can test it in the follow up sequence, for example, the third or, or force email as some links and, and you check if people click on them. And with open rate, I, I think in at least the first 1000 or 2000 emails you should track the open rate. And when it stabilize, You can abandon it. But also if you start with a new list, with the new, with differently filtered people, again, start with an operate because the quality of prospects can have a huge effect on o o on operate as well. Makes sense. Yeah. How just, okay. It's a very technical detail, but how want to track open rate? Usually the email marketing softwares and also called email softwares use their domain or a common domain for this one, pixel images. But you want to settle up your own domain for this as well. So for example, a sub-domain of your website, so I dunno, tracking that domain.com or something like that because you can again, avoid that other spammers would blacklist or get closer you to blacklist,

Viktor: 50:34

so, so other, other others contaminate.

Mihaly: 50:38

You want to avoid contamination, so you want to use your own domain address for this operat tracking.

, Viktor: 50:45

you, you should do it like right away or like for me it's easier to just like maybe use, use their basic tracking. Tesla saw small subset and once it's done, switch to the cold outreach software and use the plain text without el tracking. And so that's, that's, that's, that's what you mean.

Mihaly: 51:06

There is no benefit, potential benefit to use email providers, cold email providers, email marketing providers domain for operator tracking. Oh,

Viktor: 51:15

okay. So should set it up as soon as possible. Test it on the first few email verses and once, once everything is done and, and working well, then you just like switch it off all together and just play in text. Yes. And there is

Mihaly: 51:29

one last measurement that I haven't measured. It's called unsubscribe rate. And there is another topic. So do you want people to unsubscribe? The short answer is yes, it's good for you because first they will clean your list and if somebody's not interested, it is better not to send any follow up emails to them. And also you can track who are the people who are unsubscribed. You can feel, you can, you can understand what are the company sites, what are the industry, what are the other, other things that are common in these unsubscribe people. And in the next round, you won't send people like this. Oh, that makes

Viktor: 52:05

sense. Because then if you find some common ground in email addresses, which are unsubscribing, then you just omit they just avoid them in the next round of email collecting. That's, that's

Mihaly: 52:17

extremely smart. And so, so the minimum is to have clear unsubscribing in the bottom of your email. When we started to send out tens of thousands of emails to our visitors in our previous company, I put an unsubscribing at the top of the email as well, because I really want people to unsubscribe if they are not interested. And, and the worst thing that can happen is that people click on spam, put on spam, put on trash on Gmail, and other applications. So, so you really want to avoid that and you really want to make it easy for people for unsubscribe from your email.

Viktor: 52:55

It, it just reminds me of spammers doing kind of like big door unsubscribe links in their outwork emails, but they send out a lot of spams and there's a very prominent unsubscribe button or link at the top of the email. It's easy to find and click on it, and it does nothing, absolutely nothing because they don't send follow up. It's just for the sake of p it's kind of like appears as, as people are opening up a link, right? So it's it's quite quite fun. And and then an interesting implication, which you can basically steal from spammers and use it for a good pur purposes as well. But I would

Mihaly: 53:32

say if there is, it is a subscribing that it's could be unsubscribe forever.

Viktor: 53:37

Yeah, sure. I mean, yes, yes, of course. But it's kind of like an inspiration, almost like coming from spammers. And also another thing is you mentioned before that the open rate is tracked to a pixel, which is in invisible, so invisible image. And sometimes email providers are preloading these images, so you cannot like distinguish between someone who really opened up the image itself, or it's just like a fake or false positive. And there's a trick for it. I, I, I read that you should put in the email, in, in the image URL that unsubscribe, because if the u itself contains the word unsubscribe, then the softwares will, won't open it up because they. Obviously afraid that they without wanting it, but, but unsubscribing someone so they don't open and don't preload images and u URLs with unsubscribing it. So that's kind of like a neat trick, which I just like came to my mind regarding open rate tracking. Okay. Regarding the

Mihaly: 54:39

open rate, the, there is something you tapped into, which is accuracy and precision. So what are these? Accuracy is a thing that it's actually the reality. So for example, if you see 70% is your open rate, that you can make sure that out of 100 people, 70 people, 70 people open your email. So, which is not true because some email softwares open their email and, and download these images. And also some tech savvy people set up their emails to don't download remote images on their emails. So you won't measure all the opens as well. Precision is something that maybe not the, not the reality, but very precisely you can track the progress. So you don't, you don't have to think about how many people are not downloading the image and how many people not opening the email while they're software downloading the image. Because the trend is the important things. You

Viktor: 55:41

shouldn't treat as a snapshot of like, okay, this is the ultimate route of like 70 people opening my email out of hundred. It's much more about like, okay, is it progressing or improving as I'm sending follow ups? So does it make sense Or it's just like I'm shouting in a void and nothing

Mihaly: 55:56

happens. Alright. Okay. So if, if it goes from 70% to 40, you have a problem. It goes to 40 to 70, you are doing something right, but there is. No other things, but, but still with all there, there, there, these two things that we mentioned are balancing them out. So still aiming for 70 to 80% open rate, which is tracked. Open rate is a good rule of sum. Oh, okay. Cool. Yeah, I think we have done with the technical stuff and we can go to the actual campaign follow ups and the copywriting.

Viktor: 56:33

Okay, that sounds neat. And to be honest this is not even a podcast we are doing. This is a masterclass with lots of nitty gritty details I wasn't aware before, even though I've worked with you and working with you closely for more than 10 years. So, so I'm extremely appreciate all the things you're sharing and all the little secrets you cannot find easily

Mihaly: 56:53

on the internet. So let's go TOAs and as Charlie Mangar would say, how can we avoid to be very stupid? So you shouldn't think about how, can be very clever and how to use the best words ever in your subject line. But you should just focus on avoid to be a very bad email sender. So what are the common traits of bad emails? First, they are not relevant. They start with greetings, like, dear friend, or hello, or just greetings and via sir or

Viktor: 57:27

madam, the

Mihaly: 57:28

yes dear esteemed madam or Sir and something like that. So you will know this, this email was delivered to another 100,000 people and it's an instant turnoff. Second one. Why? Why is it not relevant? Because it's not. Talk about you, not talk about your pains, your benefits, but only talk about the company who sent the email. Next one. It's how can, why common trait of bad emails. It's not a plain text, but super flashy things, what you already mentioned. Subject line. How can you write a bad subject, subject line? Use all caps. Use sentence case. Just think about again, your friends wouldn't use all caps in your subject line apart from a few very angry examples, but usually not. Or if you would use a word like urgent or very urgent in your email. It's mostly spammers., do also bad emails are very, really long, too much feature, but not no tangible and verifiable data. Who is the sender? You don't recognize the sender and even it feels sketchy. I just check my spam folder and the first email was from, and I quoted Mr. Cab O. So I think no. Same people would use MR in the email address and, and not, at least not in the Anglo-Saxon and European culture. Next one sent from a free email account, Viktor of Gmail, Hotmail, or other free email providers. It's still also bad sign for spa filters, but also not, there is no respectable company who will send the email from a Gmail address. There is a, another trade for bad emails. Reply to a different email address, for example. No reply@company.com. No. You want to start a conversation with called emails and your friends want to start a conversation so there is no an other reply to address and of course, no, no replies. The biggest turnoff, if any desperation is coming through the email. I know that maybe it's your third or force., Time you try send a cold email and your boss has given you harsh deadlines and harsh goals, but desperation should never come through your emails. It should be always happy, fun, light. Another victim of re, recently, I, I received a, a very good email, a cold email, I think this is about two months ago, three months ago. So this is one of the one or two emails every, every year I receive. And the biggest turnoff was for me that there was no verifiable person, no company. I checked the sender's name in Google, no results. Just some other people with a young sportsman, no LinkedIn profile. And sometimes I, I start, I start a conversation with Code Sanders to understand their business model and understand their thinking. I. And, and I ask okay, I'm, I'm really interested. The, the, the wording was good. The, the, it was targeting, so it was good email, but ask, okay, can you send me your LinkedIn or, or Facebook at least or something. And he said, I'm, I'm not on social media. And it was an instant instant turnoff. But think about, usually you, you spend emails people who never met in real life and they get a lot of emails, people who they never met in real life. So you want to show as much trust signal as you can. And the last thing here is the Center's incentive is not clear for me. What do I mean? So for example, if somebody say that, can I send you a free report? I get instantly suspicious. Why do you want to send me something from free? Why is it good for you? Do you want to scam me? And then do you want to. Charge it after I received it or what, what is the business model? So you, you should be pretty clear. If you, for example, you organizing team building events, then can I send you more about our team building offers or emails? So it'll, they will instantly know that they will go there, cook something and you, they will pay for them. But also if you are an agency, then you should be upfront that we would send you this report and later we could help you in this and these parts of business

Viktor: 1:02:05

building. Yeah, it's extremely important. Cause it reminds me of a CRM client where we triple the conversion rate and what they did, they as an lead generation, they, they basically did free versions to, to business owners to help them to progress and improve their processes. Right. And just by giving an answer to why is it free on the website? And it was basically just saying, okay, we are doing it for free to give back. It wasn't something. Super deep. It was a very cheap, easy answer, but that was kind of like the truth to it, that okay, they want to give back and it's totally free. You have no obligation afterwards to purchase anything. But obviously if you think what we do and teach is helpful and you think that our tool is useful for you, it's up to you to buy it. It's no pressure, but just by answering it, it had a huge and insanely big uplift in the conversion rate.

Mihaly: 1:02:59

Right. Okay. So we, we are approaching copywriting, but before that, I would like to tell you the ratios where, where should you put your energy? So in the beginning I would say it's 40% on creating a list, highly high quality segmented email list. The next 30% what we are approaching now, understanding the pains of your target audience and understanding their goals, gen their jobs, their objections. The next 10% is the technical stuff. Technically set up everything, which we already mentioned, and the last, only the last 20% is the actual copywriting. So let's go to the second most important part, understanding pains, goals of your target audience. So before you craft anything, before you start writing, you should understand the pains of your target audience. The good news is that I think C G P T is extremely good in this. So, for example, again, cooking school example you can ask C G P T what could be the benefits of a team building event of a cooking plus team building event. And also you can ask, what are the common pains of companies who are organizing a team building event? So, for example, it may ask that there is not enough bonding between people because of remote work or something like that. So you, you will know some pains and, and, and benefits. I, I,

Viktor: 1:04:30

I was talking to a friend of mine and we were talking about writing texts and copy and emails with chat g pt and why people get very blunt, very plain answers, which are not even personalized and, and not, not to be exciting. And it, to be frank, they're not, they don't work very well because they're just like vert pasta basically. And I realized while I was answering, I realized there's 10 levels, how you can use chat g p t to write anything like cold emails or emails. And even those people who think they're advanced, they're on the level three and not even on the level 10. The first issue is how everyone does it. It is just like, write a generic comment to write an email to me. Right? So, and it, it becomes really generic with how can you personalize something if the, even the prompt is very generic. And that's level one, level two. You provide some information about you, like, okay, it's all about me, me, me, me. So write an email about me and you provide a big, big prompt. This is level two, and level three is quite advanced because you say, okay, what is your goal? So you say like, okay, I want to get new clients. I want to get new clients who need like some hardware, software, integrated software, and not mobile applications. So that's level three. And level four is a big jump. So I realized that in G P T technology, it matters the word you use. So if you're not familiar with the field, you are, you, you want, you want to use it for like, for emails and cold outreach. There's a big difference between write a me email versus write a cold outreach email. It's almost like write a tdr, write a summary, write an execut executive summary. Explain it like I'm five, so Ali five. These are different things. And so if you not just use like, okay, write an email, but write a cold outreach email. So use the terminology right. It's level four. And level five is like write a cold outreach email and there is like a target audience, and then you start to talk about yourself. Right? Okay. So, so, so the level five is when you say like, okay, what you want to do with specific wording, terminology, cold outreach, and what is your goal and what is the information about you? And level five is when actually you start to speak about the recipient of your email. So write a cold outreach, email, and this is the recipient, right? So this is a company, and you can go to level seven if you include information about the participant itself. So it's not just write cold outreach, email, also with the target and also what information you should know about them. Right?

Mihaly: 1:07:11

So this is a visa. Can you tell us an example for this?

Viktor: 1:07:14

Sure. So instead of just, Telling that, okay, write a cold outreach email to topical company or to an electric company, or to a plumbing company, or to a Venice company. I can write, okay, this is like the exact location and this is the name of the Venice company, a spa. I'm writing an email, outreach email. As a developer company, I can include like, okay, these are the target audiences of that specific Spark company, and please include it in with the goal in mind that I want to get some I inbound business. And then at level eight, so level eight is basically this. It's not just called outreach email, but also what is my goal? Like I want to get clients and also who is the target audience specifically. Is what you mean? What, what, what you just described before that you start to talk about pain. So it's not just cold outreach, it's not that the Spark company, not just the different services the Spark company is selling, but also what are the possible pains they experience to get more business to decrease their cost base or something. So you, you actually start to include information about their possible pains and you can use G P T or g p d like technologies to brainstorm as you mentioned before. Like, okay, this is the company, what pain do they experience? And level 10 is when everything is included. So it's included a specific terminology like please write a cold outreach email. And then who is the recipient? So this is a spark company residing in, in, in Minnesota. I dunno which which city. And then the pain is what they experience during running. The the everyday business. And then you also include information about you because it's also about you, like what you are good at and what you're not good at. So obviously you don't want to get mobile application development opportunities if you're not good at it. If you are good at it, obviously you want to have that and not like website development. This is how you can answer from level one to level 10 to use some terminology, use the specific knowledge and , this is really useful I guess.

Mihaly: 1:09:24

Level 11, you can always push into 11. Yeah, so I think level 11 that we already talked about in your previous episode. Then the actual copywriting. Structure. So for example, using frameworks in the copywriting, like children's principles, the principles from breakthrough advertising, and also make it simple, optimize for clarity. And also there are more details which will not get into. But , if you're interesting, let us know and we'll talk about in a future episode. Yeah, so

Viktor: 1:09:59

just write some nice comment and we make and shoot future episode.

Mihaly: 1:10:04

Okay, so back to the structure. So I talked about, think about pains and and goals. What you already mentioned is level seven, eight, like something like that. And also the, this is the C G P T way, but there, there is also the old school way, which I think still useful because C G P T doesn't know anything. So you should ask your current customers. And , also if you can find anybody in your target audience, talk with them and ask about their pains, gains jobs. Again, this is the framework, the of framework that we may talk about later, more details, but in general, what are their goals and what are the pains? The next thing is objections, and it's a little bit different because you will get objections after you present an offer. And usually if you're running a business you already got some objections and it's very good to front run these objections. So before even the, even the clients or the readers of these emails, think about the objections, handle these objections. And for example, this service you were talking about must be too expensive for me, so I don't even request more information. Then you can front it and say it's below the price range of, I dunno,$1,000 or something like that. Maybe other things. So

Viktor: 1:11:28

in, in normal setting, the, a good question do allocate some specific objection. Against the sale would be what prevents you now from buying, or if money wouldn't be at the issue, could be signed at the end today and now. Right, because if you put the money aside of a, then you get, get the real objections.

Mihaly: 1:11:52

Okay, so we made some research. Even if it's just g p t, it's sometimes it's, it's enough to start and you can fine tune it later before you go into actual copywriting. You think about the follow up sequence. Why? Because with these benefits and pains, you will generate a list. In an ideal setting, you should ask the customers and potential customers, what are their most important jobs? What are the most important benefits that they think about your offer? And start with them. But also, I think you can prioritize them. And it's very important to, don't put every benefit in one email. Don't put every, don't try to answer every pain in one email, but this is what follow up is. Great. You start with the most relevant or the most important or, or what you think is the most important. Just put it in the first email. You get the second one, put it in the second email. And with follow ups, it's important not just to send, did you read my previous email? Did you read my previous email? But always try to add more value to change the, change the subject of the actual email, not the subject line, but the actual subject approach from a different angle. Say something else about your offer. Say something else about your customers and how can you make their life

Viktor: 1:13:10

better? Can you give an example for how to provide value in a follow up email? Yeah,

Mihaly: 1:13:16

so let's go to cooking classes first. I would start with a very plain email just to make it short and set up who we are. So for example, this is an actual email. I will start with a plain email. Have you been to a team building ewis with your company and I, after that, I would I would put very short trusting that we have been providing team building emails for eight years and we have more than 100 five star rating on TripAdvisor.

Viktor: 1:13:46

You, you put it at the end of the email or you put it at the Ps at the very back of the email

Mihaly: 1:13:52

first. This is the body copy. This is just a plain body copy copy to start. So, one thing about asking, have you been to the meeting events and just some trust things that we are an established player in the field. And after sign, email and after you can go to PS field, which is a very great part of copywriting because a lot of people just scroll down to a PS and don't read long body copies. So you can summarize in the PS or you can repeat the call to action. For example your call to action in the body copies. Can I send you more information about our team building given just reply? Yes. And yes, it's capitalized. So make it distinct from the copy. Just reply yes, and I will send you more information.

Viktor: 1:14:38

Basically, you try to make it as easy as possible for them to answer, because if you don't say that it's okay to write just a yes, then they're in the mindset of, okay, I have to like write a answer and I have to think through what I'm Right, exactly. I have to be polite. And then there's lot of hustle and they just skip it all together. And if you give permission, they just reply. Yes. They don't feel bad about that, right? Yes, very

Mihaly: 1:15:03

correct. So in this case, PS would be to repeat. Just if you're interested in team buildings, just reply us, I send you more, or something like that. So, okay. So, so this is, this is one of a, a structure and okay, where, where, where, where can you put the benefits? So for example, you can put the benefits in, in these lines. Would you like to have more bonding between your employees? And in the second email are tired of boring team building events like having a dinner, which can be great or which can be very boring depending on the setting. And on the third email, you can put another feature of your product. For example, when, when we send out emails in the autumn, which is very rainy in Hungary, I will send that team building is the perfect program for rainy weather. There is no risk like in out outdoor team building events or so, so in, in, in three emails, you send them two different benefits and one feature of your product.

Viktor: 1:16:04

Kind of like describe how you can make their life easier in the follow up emails? Yes.

Mihaly: 1:16:09

Let's go to the actual copywriting one by one. Start with, from the top to the bottom. When you see an email, what is the first thing that you see? The sender who sent this email? And usually if you, if you send cold emails, people won't recognize your name. So first it's, it's good to have a familiar name. If you are sending emails to an English speaking country, it would be wise to be a sender, an English name. So don't use, I don't know, Russian characters. Serial characters don't use Chinese characters. And so pretty basic. But also don't use African names, Slavik names or other ones. So if you have an employee in your company with, with an English name, that's a good, also, you can experiment with sending emails from a female, from a male center. There are some differences and also there are some different levels., In company. For example, in sales intern or VP of SE sales of c e o, and usually the higher, higher rank you can send in an email, the better. Or there are some edge cases where you want to talk with a matching person, but the higher, higher rank you can send, the better. So this is the center

Viktor: 1:17:24

hire. If like the CEO is sending an email to me, then I'm thinking like, okay, cannot be that serious of that big. Yeah.

Mihaly: 1:17:31

I think it's depends on the company side. If you're a 10% startup and the CEO is sending out email, it's something that, okay, you have the, I have the attention of the ceo. I think it's good. If you are a 1000 people company, then no CEO shouldn't send cold emails. It's not believable that he or she would manage the cold email campaigns. The next one is people sometimes use that. For example, they put Mihai from Disruptors Digest. In the email address or in the email, in the name, the, the, the display name. And this is again, something, it's not black or white. You should experiment with your target market. Just an idea. The second line after, after your name is a subject line. And I think it's a huge topic. I already mentioned don't use all caps, don't use sentence case. They are not like from a friend send. Usually it should be very short like two words, three words, even one word. Because the longer it is, the more likely that some marketing company is sending it or writing it, and they want to put everything., so make it short and, and, and make it look like a friend. Send it to you.

Viktor: 1:18:47

Well, the subjects I, I'm email using in personal setting as well is like, quick question, right? Actually two words, subject line. And it's actually just a quick question. So it's kind of like foreshadows that it's not something which needs deep attention. So you can have a quick win just by seeing it and quickly answering it. This

Mihaly: 1:19:06

is the last part of our podcast. We will go a high level overview on the copywriting. After that, I will give you a checklist and this is all for today. So if you are more interested in copywriting in details, please comment below or send us an email or go to Artisan and Marketing and contact us and we will make a future episode about the copywriting. So I would like to go just on a high level under all parts of an email. First one is the sender. Usually people won't be familiar with your name if you're, if you're sending cold emails. What you can do if you're sending emails to English speaking people, then have an English name. The second one you can experiment is with having a male sender or a female sender. The third one is usually the higher up the ranks you are sending the email from. So for example, a email sender shouldn't be a sales intern, but the VP of sales of if your company is small than than a C E O, it's the better and you can expect higher reply rates. The second one is subject line. And subject line is where personalization comes in. So first thing, you can experiment with having a first name or the whole name of your recipient in your subject line. And also having a company name in your subject line. So for example, hi Viktor, are you interested in team building? Or something like that. But usually, or maybe my company

Viktor: 1:20:28

in the subject line as well. So how I Vitor Art Marketing is interested in yes, in building exercises,

Mihaly: 1:20:34

more personalization the better. Also you should aim for a short subject line. Two words even maybe just one word., you mentioned earlier mean so-called quick question, which is a little bit burned out as far as I know. But anything that check what your, what kind of emails your friend sent to you plan plans for this week. Usually I, I send, it's an actual subject line, which is I tested and successful is Italian cooking class. And the question mark, this is the, this is the team building , actual subject line. Next one is the preview text, which is about two lines of text that most email softwares and applications like Gmail and mail applications show you. And again, this is the first view. This is the first thing that people see. So I will emphasize personalization. Again, put the first name again. If you have the first name, put the company name, put the industry, put any, any information in the personalization that you have, and try to squeeze in some benefit, some something that you will make people curious. So in the subject line and in the preview text, you don't want to send your offer. You want just to send open so people want to open your email and text come the body copy. General advice. No more than five sentences. So we should be very short. Nobody reads long text., so in for five sentences and exactly one question mark in the body copy. You want to ask people one thing? Yeah. There is one single call to action. For example, can I send more information? If yes, than just reply Yes. As we already talked about. And also personalization. How much personalization can you put in an email? I can say you should put at least three first name, company name industry maybe, but you can go up to 15. So as the company size, number of employees and also there are some other kind of personalization. For example, sending out case studies. And if you are a marketing agency and I'm offering a team building givens, I would say that , your competitor, another marketing agency from the town has a very successful team building even that at us. And after they survey the survey, their employees and they become 10% happier in their work workplace. So first, there's familiarity because they know the other company as well., they will think it's relevant because their competitors using your service. And sir, there is some measurable benefits, which is actually pretty hard for team building. But , for other fields it's very easy to put some measurable performance data. And what are the frameworks for copywriting, what I already already mentioned, paying in job., so focus on for this, this, this paying in job is just focused on, on the, on the client. And the second one is child's principle. You can use it in copywriting. And j g PT is very good in child's principle. Just a few examples for this I will mentioned very, very briefly. So what is, what are the charity's principle? First one, and I think one of the strongest one is scarcity. So for example, you can send an email that I will be only in two days in this, in your town. Can we meet up? Or for example, if you are sending emails and you're a conference organizer, you can say that we have only 10 spots left for speakers on our event. Are you interested in becoming a speaker? So this is scarcity. Second one is liking, for example, what, what liking is something that which is similar to you. And this case, what I already mentioned, that your competitors have already been using our product. Are you interesting? But any kind of similarities? Same town. Same industry. Same school. If you are approaching persons in company, Just putting them in a, in a as group, really good

Viktor: 1:24:37

niche down in liking. So you can create different, even different landing pages, different campaigns based on, like, someone is a entrepreneur, someone a sole entrepreneur, someone is a small or medium sized business owner. Someone is a carrier manager at a big company. So you can reach out to them and talk to them on their level. As you said with the agency owners. If this is from marketing agency owners, this is what they experience. And since it's closer to you, they are more like you, you than to have more interest in whatever they experience.

Mihaly: 1:25:13

Right. Okay. So the next one is reciprocity., what you can do is position something as a gift. So for example, we created a, a report which is about your industry, and it's relevant only for a few companies like you. Can I send it to you? So it's for reciprocity.

Viktor: 1:25:34

Sorry. It's extremely important to, it has to be genuinely honest and free. So it's, it cannot be like if you purchase above, I, I don't know, a hundred dollars, I send it for free. So the shipping is free. It's not reciprocity. Reciprocity. If you get something for free without string attached, so you get this report. It's not like you have to fill out a survey or whatnot. It's just like a question. I don't want to slam you. So you just, I just ask, can I send it? And it's yes. Then I send it to you and even I can state that there is no string attached to it. I just want to shift with all the parties who, who it is relevant to. The next one is,

Mihaly: 1:26:11

is consistency. We already touch, touch this one that first you want to ask a very small thing, like to type only Yes. In a reply email and after they type Yes. And you send something to them. Then you can ask for a bigger things, like, can you meet can you schedule a phone call? Or just the next step, which is a little bit bigger. And this is a, a consistency,

Viktor: 1:26:36

co consistency. It's extremely interesting. So let me diverge for two minutes here because okay. In the charity, charity is Influence book, there is a research about this that people, they ask people whether they're willing to put up a bigger sign in their back backyard about safe driving and just a few percentage said yes. And then what they did, they asked, okay, are you willing to put a bumper sticker in your car, back on your car about safe driving? And a measure of the people comply because it's easy to say yes to. So this is why foot in the door technique, cause it's extremely easy to say yes to. But what's extremely interesting is in the follow up they asked, Since you're driving with this bumper sticker, are you willing to put up this big sign in your backyard? And two-thirds of the people complied with the request. So the compliance rate just jumped by a huge margin. And this is something which you can use even with ai. And that's, that's mind blowing actually, because sometimes if you use chat g p t, it's not complying. It says, okay, as a large language model, I cannot write code or I cannot write emails or, I don't know. So it's, it's, it's, it's not complying with your request. And what you can do with chat, G P T is ask a leading question. So you say, okay, I need some help to compose an email. Are you willing to help me? Please just answer yes. Since it's answering yes in the history of the chat. Once you are starting to write your actual request, the history or. Already com , contains a yes. So it's more than more than willing to comply with your request. So this is quite funny how even these large language models can be influenced by leading questions and these foot in the door technique. So this is, sorry for the diversion, but this is something I, it's, it's

Mihaly: 1:28:23

very, yeah. If, if you talk about behavior experiments, just one very short mention here, which is related to consistency. The, I think it was at Princeton or some other prestigious university, they asked students to give blood. They ask them, they describe why is it beneficial for other people. And so, and they have about 5% show rate in, in the next one hour when this blood giving was available. And in the next group they showed people on the map how can they get, how can they get to the blood giving center in the, in their university campus so they know the exact steps and from 5% in front to 15% or something like that, like two for three foot. So when, when you say put in the door, this is another aspect. Tell them what exactly want them to do because maybe they want to do, but they're confused with the next step. So if you say that, just reply yes in an email and we will go to next step for, and, and when you want to book a meeting, just click on this calendar link and book a meeting for the next week. You will see at least five open slots or something like that. This is what I say, clear call to action.

Viktor: 1:29:35

Yeah, and I guess Alex foremost did this with Jim Launcher. It's not just about getting a gym membership, but also making it extremely easy all the way to losing weight, getting in shape that, okay, you don't have to think about like diet because they help you, what to choose, what to buy, and so on and so on. So, Whatever is your client buying from you, you can always make it easier for them to put it in practice. And that's it. That, that can, that can have a tremendous impact on, on, on whatever you trying to achieve.

Mihaly: 1:30:08

Just the finished journey principle and the whole copywriting, we have two more principles, which can be under the umbrella of trust Cignas. These are authority and social proof. Authority is about you received awards, you have media appearances. For example, Teran article if you are in the startup space,

Viktor: 1:30:31

you know, right on the website it's like, and big, big, big logos. And I gu I, I gu I guess there's even like a solution or like a there's even a service where you can pay just a few 10 of maybe 50, 50 or a hundred bucks for it. And , it's, you can put on like sc on and. There are big names, which are technically you can be a syon, but they are not the main channel. So it's not like nbc, it's not like,. The big, big television channel is just some side channels and that's why you can put on your website. So there's some hack around it as well. Some shortcuts, obviously if you can proof it so you can actually link to the Tech Ranch article and not just say as seen on Tech Ranch, that's obviously always good, so always have to prove whatever you say. Cause then if people start to look and dig into you, they realize you're real and you are not faking it, you fake it., at the end of the day you won't get too far.

Mihaly: 1:31:27

Correct. Although just one aspect that you want to, you don't want to put a lot of links. Yes. And I will say you don't want to link any link besides the unsubscribed link in your email. So you have to be careful with linking. But, but you can mention in the PS field you can mention it in your signature that as mentioned in in TechCrunch or something similar or, or your awards. Okay. And the last thing is social proof. Social proof is like public reviews. For example, when we send the team building called emails, I always put more than 105 star reviews. The exact, I always put the exact actual number of TripAdvisor reviews and Google reviews. And I put it like 5.0 out of five on TripAdvisor, 139 reviews, something like that. So, so this is social approval. Okay, these were the principles and these were a high level copywriting. And to finish this podcast, I would give you a checklist. Before we end this podcast. I will go one by one and, and of course you, if you sign that, if you sign up to our newsletter, you will immediately receive this checklist. So first thing, check Before you send, first, send the email to your own email address and click all the links if you have any. And check everything is working. Check it on mobile, check it on desktop screen. Next one, check if the sender is gender is right., check if the subject, the preview text are great and it's personalized. It's not just the placeholder text. And also check the copy. Next one. Think about the call call to action. Is it clear? Is it only one single call to action in the email? Is it easy to do? And does your email have one single question mark in your email? Next one length check. Is it five sentences? If it's longer, then put it in two emails. Break up in two emails and put it in someone as in the follow up text. Next, check. How many, how many times do you mention? Do you mention I or we? Is it minimal? Do you talk more about your recipient? Next one, do you mention any value? Do you mention any benefit? Do you provide solution for any pain? So do you talk about this next one, unsubscribe. Do you have an unsubscribe button? Does it work? Please click on it. Check this and see in your system if you are really unsubscribed. Also, before you send out, just double check if email are verified. So there is a low probability of bounds. And for the mindset and the framework we mentioned the copywriting. Is it short? Is it clear? Did you use chi principle or other principles that you're familiar with? And that

Viktor (2): 1:34:33

is all right. Thank you very much., as I said, um, previously, I feel like this is a actual masterclass in cold email outreach, you know, because I went from having a vague understanding to actually having a clear steps, what they have to look out for and how can I optimize them and exact tools I can use, and not just physical tools, but also mental models as well. So this was extremely useful for me and I hope that for the listeners as well, so for their listeners, Please go to disruptor digest.com, subscribe so you can get an access to our knowledge base every growing knowledge base. And also, please rate and subscribe to our podcast and write comments down below or Verizon email. Go to artisan.marketing. Reach out to us if you need anything and see you in the next episode.

Mihaly: 1:35:25

Thank you much. Bye.